We piled in the car again this morning, and headed south to Hot Springs to check out the Mammoth Site. In 1974, a construction worker who was clearing the land for a housing development discovered a mammoth tooth. Construction was halted, an excavation was organized, and more mammoth bones were discovered. Archeologists eventually determined that the site was a giant sinkhole where dozens of woolly mammoths, along with other animal species, were trapped and buried about 27,000 years ago.
Since then, a large building has been built around the site -- and excavation continues. In fact, the dig will go on for at least the next 20 or 30 years; it will take at least that long to unearth, document and preserve all the remains. To date, at least 59 individual mammoths have been identified. We took a 30-minute tour of the site and looked around in the exhibit hall.
It was a hot day, and Hot Springs is a dusty little town, so after the visit to the Mammoth Site, we searched for a place to cool off. We ended up at Evan’s Plunge, an indoor pool and water park that is fed by a thermal spring at the rate of 5,000 gallons per minute. The pool has a gravel bottom, and the 87-degree water is crystal-clear and untreated by chlorine, since the pool water is completely replaced 16 times a day by the flow from the spring. Although the facility is about as modern and sophisticated as your elementary school gym (it’s, like, 100 years old), the kids didn’t seem to mind; they thoroughly enjoyed going down the water slides over and over and over.
After a few hours in the pool, we got cleaned up and headed north into Custer State Park, to Blue Bell Lodge, where we had reservations for a chuck wagon dinner. After we received our complimentary cowboy hats and bandanas, we boarded a hay wagon and headed out to a picnic dinner served up in a beautiful, wildflower-filled meadow in a corner of the state park. It took about an hour to get out there, and we were entertained by musicians playing old-timey standards on guitar and ukelele along the way.
Dinner was steak and hamburgers, and, lucky me, I got singled out in front of the crowd for requesting my meat well done. After dinner, there was more music and even a little dancing in the field. What a beautiful evening.
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